“‘GABRIEL.’
“My eyes flashed open, pupils dilating in the dark. A bird with broken wings beat swift inside my belly. For one blessed moment, I thought I was in our bed back home. The peaceful rhythm of my daughter’s breath drifting down the hall, the bare branches of the sycamore outside our room scraping against the window. All was peace, and all was well, and I held tight, closing my eyes against the truth.
“But then I smelled rot in the walls, vague hints of fresh blood and stale mold and rat. The soft sounds down the hall belonged to Dior, the boy now moaning in his sleep. And the silk-soft scratching at the window belonged to …
“‘Gabriel.’
“I sat up in bed and saw her, suspended and breathless in the night beyond the window. Her hair was blackest velvet, her cheek, the curve of a broken heart. Her skin was pale and bare as the barrow-bleached bones of long-forgotten queens. In her eyes, I saw the answer to every question, every wanting, every fear I’d never known the naming of, and she pressed herself to the glass, hands and lips and breasts, all smooth curves and shadows full of promise, whispering soft as the sleep she’d stolen me from.
“‘Let me in.’
“I rose from my furs, bare feet on hard boards, bare chest in chill air. The silver troth ring on my finger felt heavy as lead. She tracked my movement like a wolf ahunt, and she swayed, drifting away into the snow-kissed dark and then surging back, pressing harder now against the window. Black fingernails whispered up over her hips, sinking like claws into the soft swell of her shoulders, dragged deep down her arms and then, red and dripping, scribbling, scratching, on the glass once more. Eyes on mine, she bit down, a dark pearl of promise welling on her lip.
“‘Let me in, my lion.’
“All that stood between us now were two words. Strange how so much power, so much peril and promise, resides in so tiny a thing. Two little words can carry weight enough to see empires rise and kingdoms fall. Two little words can begin the end of everything. How many hearts have been made complete by words so small as I do? How many more have been shattered with a breath as tiny as It’s over? Little sounds that reshape or unmake your entire world, like great spells of old to redraw the very lines by which you see yourself and all else about you. Two little words.
“‘Forgive me.’
“‘Do it.’
“‘I can’t.’
“‘You must.’
“I could already feel her lips, warm as old autumn, the taste of burning leaves on her tongue. I could imagine pale hands slipping into my britches, pale legs wrapped tight around my waist, my teeth grazing her lip and her blood singing between us, filling the empty inside. She pressed against the window as I drew closer, hunger and sheerest wanting, and she smiled, all the colors of despair. With shaking hands, I unlocked the window and pulled the sill up slow. And with a voice that sounded not quite like my own, I spoke two words.
“Two little words.
“‘Come in.’”